When I give talks on social media, I start with the primacy of search. Googling yourself is the best way to understand this. Your corporate website is only part of the equation – and a diminishing one. Other social media sites and sites related to you help fill in the whole picture.

If you don’t like what you see when you Google yourself, change it by creating more content for Google to index. I like this post about online reputation management (ORM) because it captures the essence of this content-based approach. And since most people don’t take in more than the first Google results screen, positive content can fairly easily displace negative or unrelated content at the top of the search results.

But doesn’t that raise a curious question about the superficiality of online reputations in the first place? I’m not suggesting ORM is not important – just that you take online reputation with a grain of salt.